Microsoft’s top Intel­lec­tual Prop­erty chap, Tom Rubin, had some inter­est­ing points to make at the UK AOP:

Start­ing back in the early 1990s, some lead­ing Inter­net pun­dits espoused the motto “inform­a­tion wants to be free” and implored con­tent own­ers to simply give away their con­tent and mon­et­ize it through sec­ond­ary means – such as con­certs and tee-shirts for musi­cians and, in the case of media, the prom­ise of a strong income stream by adopt­ing a busi­ness model con­sist­ing of free and lib­eral dis­tri­bu­tion plus online advertising.

And that’s exactly what most news­pa­pers did. By the late 1990s, almost all news­pa­pers put their valu­able report­ing and exclus­ive com­ment­ary online and allowed it to pro­lif­er­ate, eas­ily access­ible and free.

They did just as the new model pro­fessed and sold advert­ising to mon­et­ize the increased audi­ence they were attracting.

Well, here we are ten years later bom­barded almost daily by announce­ments of news­pa­per lay­offs and closures.

The evid­ence is in, and I think we can safely say that the “inform­a­tion wants to be free” approach not only does not work, actu­ally it has been a dis­aster for almost all newspapers.

Yet even today, des­pite being con­fron­ted with moun­tains of evid­ence of fail­ure, some Inter­net lead­ers con­tinue to pro­pose the very same pre­scrip­tion for the future of newspapers.

A vice pres­id­ent of Google told pub­lish­ers earlier this year that they needed to embrace the “ubi­quity” of con­tent on the web, and that the sur­viv­ors will be those that adapt to this new reality.

And Wired’s Chris Ander­son will soon pub­lish a book called “Free” that argues that busi­nesses of the future can only make money by giv­ing their products away.

But for the media at least, the ver­dict is in and the time has come to reject these claims once and for all.

Tinker­ing with your cur­rent online busi­ness mod­els by try­ing to develop a more organic rela­tion­ship with read­ers or by beef­ing up link journ­al­ism (the latest buzzword) may help, but it is not going to fix the cur­rent situation.

Think we can see where this is heading:

The key to the game is to build a loyal audi­ence, which makes the rampant mis­use of valu­able copy­rights and the dilu­tion of trus­ted brands online today so harm­ful to publishers.

That’s pre­cisely why news­pa­pers have objec­ted to Google News aggreg­a­tion sites. And why com­mer­cial pub­lish­ers have opposed the search-within-a-site fea­ture that allows users to search a publisher’s site from within Google’s own pages – where Google con­trols the exper­i­ence, sup­plies the ads and reaps the eco­nomic rewards.

Rubin has a point. But not — per­haps yet — an answer.